Warhol’s Photo Archive

This project originated when the Andy Warhol Foundation selected Stanford University as the home for a collection of more than 3,600 contact sheets.

The reasons for this choice — Stanford’s history with photography starting with the experiments of Edward Muybridge, Stanford’s interest in researching and developing the technologies of big data, and Stanford’s commitment to interdisciplinary teaching and research — live on in this project, and have already resulted in a special exhibit at the Cantor Arts Center and the book Contact Warhol: Photography Without End. Warhol brought his camera with him everywhere, taking at least 36 exposures each day in the last decade of his life. Warhol’s practice of photographing and documenting the moment anticipates the ubiquity of the camera today. The collection of Andy Warhol's contact sheets amounts to about 130,000 individual exposures. Each contact sheet records the exposures from a roll of film. This project will create innovative, machine-learning aided ways to access this massive archive of digitized images.